Ha ha!

You certainly never know what movie he'll review next!

Sunday, 2 September 2012

Burl reviews Witchtrap! (1988)

Good day, it’s Burl! Yes indeed, it’s time for another movie
review, and this time I’m going to tell you about a spooky movie, or at least a
movie that’s meant to be spooky, from the director of Witchboard! I remember seeing that one at the local movie theater,
which seems such an oddball proposition nowadays, it being such a low-budget
picture!

This one is called Witchtrap,
which proves that this is a director who enjoys working on a theme! Ha ha, he
likes witchy things! In this case there are no Ouija boards, though! It’s a
movie in a genre I really like, the haunted house investigation picture! The Haunting is one of the best of these
of course, and The Legend of Hell House is another fine example, and the
question for anyone going into Witchtrap
is: how will this stack up against these ghostly classics?

Ha ha, not too well! But it’s not a simple case of good
movie/bad movie, because while Witchtrap
is most certainly a bad movie, it’s not without its special charms! I’ll tell
you the story: after a prologue in which a rhinestone-jacketed fellow hurtles
out the window of a large mansion, the guy who owns the place hires some
parapsychologists and a bicker-prone security team to exorcise the evil spirit
haunting it, or else prove that it’s all just bunkum and honeydew!

I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of arguing in this movie! The
hero, whose square-jawed, quasi-Ash appearance underlines this picture’s Evil Dead pretensions, is extremely vocal
in his opinion that all this ghost stuff is just so much codswallop! He also
doesn’t like his boss much, and says so at every opportunity! It’s a great
relief when the killer phantom, an evil magician, begins killing off the gang,
though he makes a tactical mistake in my opinion by starting with their
cameraperson, played by that great star of horror, Linnea Quigley! Ha ha, she
gets a pixilated shower head in the throat, which is an odd way to go, but it
helps fulfill what I assume is a contractual demand on Quigley’s part that she
take off all her cl*thes at least once per picture!

It’s not a very scary movie, and some of the acting is not
just poor but extremely poor, and the interiors of the spook-ridden mansion are
not very atmospheric, a crippling condition for any haunted house picture! It
seems to have about three times the dialogue required to tell the story, and
the behaviour of the characters goes well beyond simple horror movie idiocy
into the sort of decision-making you might expect to find in one of Otto
Muehl’s Actionist happenings! Ha ha!

But there’s a home movie charm to it, and a few moments of
budget cleverness! I liked that it made game attempts to deliver the goods,
even if the workmanship on those goods was a bit shoddy, and a number of them
had clearly fallen off the back of Sam Raimi’s truck! For trying, I’m going to
give Witchtrap a sound one and a half
bulletproof handymen!